Sentence Examples

To this day the spoken language of Japanese women is appreciably simpler and softer than that of the men, and to this day while the educated woman uses the hiragana syllabary in writing, eschews Chinese sords and rarel pens an ideograph, the educated man employs the ideograp entirely, and translates his thoughts as far as possible into thi mispronounced Chinese words without recourse -to which it would be impossible for him to discuss any scientific subject, or even tc refer to the details of his daily business.

Analysis showed that all the required sounds could be conveyed with 47 syllables, and having selected the ideographs that corresponded .to those sounds, they reduced them, first, to forms called hiragana, and, secondly, to still more simplified forms called katakana.